The disclosure generally relates to the field of data processing, and more particularly to network management data collection.
A management information base (MIB) for network management is a formal, hierarchical description of network objects that can be managed by a network management system that, for example, implements the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). In a MIB, object identifiers (OIDs) have been assigned various entities across multiple levels and the entities have been named. These entities include managed resources, also referred to as managed objects. A managed object may be a device, a device attribute, a device component, etc. The Internet Engineering Task Force has defined the MIB specifications, MIB-1 and MIB-2. In addition to these specifications, private entities (e.g., device vendors) define MIB specification extensions with OIDs specific to their devices.
A management database (MDB), which is an implementation of a MIB, includes leaf nodes that resolve to scalar values or arrays of scalar values. A network management system or network manager can send GET requests to SNMP-enabled devices for specified OIDs input into the network management system. An OID may be an index to a device definition, a device attribute, a 2 dimensional array of managed objects, etc. SNMP-enabled devices provide responses with the values corresponding to the requested OIDs. This request-response exchange may be referred to as SNMP data collection.